California Governor Gavin Newsom sarcastically alerted America that “Trump controls the weather” after DHS Secretary Kristi Noem thanked the president for a peaceful hurricane season.
During a marathon Tuesday Cabinet meeting filled with the president’s secretaries lauding him with praise, Noem thanked Trump for keeping hurricanes at bay.
“You made it through the hurricane season without a hurricane—you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that,” she said.
The quote seemed like a joke and got a laugh in the room. Noem pivoted to praising the president for FEMA’s performance, saying the organization is “deploying resources and dollars 150 percent faster than ever before.” FEMA reports to the Department of Homeland Security.
Newsom reposted the clip on X with an ‘in case you missed it’ alert, “ICYMI: Trump controls the weather.”
ICYMI: Trump controls the weather. https://t.co/PinB4rfSnC
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) December 2, 2025
In 2025, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States during hurricane season, which stretches from June 1 to Nov. 30, for the first time in ten years. This proved fortunate for the U.S., as FEMA was in turmoil throughout 2025, to the point that its staffers openly warned Trump that he was opening himself up to a Katrina-level disaster.
Trump has spent much of 2025 threatening to cut FEMA entirely, saying disaster relief should be left to the states. The Trump administration’s first FEMA director, Cameron Hamilton, was fired in May for saying he disagreed with Trump’s vision to “wean off of FEMA.”
The organization was hit by DOGE-related staffing cuts and so-called “efficiency” measures that hampered the organization’s effectiveness following the deadly Texas floods that killed more than 100 people over the July 4th weekend.
FEMA’s acting administrator, David Richardson, who was appointed to the gig with no disaster response experience, was nowhere to be found in the 24 hours following the floods. This froze FEMA from acting immediately, as a Trump-era cost-cutting rule required Richardson to sign off on expenditures over $100,000. Richardson was on vacation at the time of the flood and had his work phone on silent.
Though the DHS boasted in August that FEMA’s disaster response time was up “126 percent,” it took Noem 72 hours to deploy FEMA to Texas. Texas residents couldn’t call FEMA because the organization had fired its call center contractors.
As a result of FEMA’s costly mismanagement of the floods, the organization’s search and rescue chief, Ken Pagurek, resigned in frustration.
Richardson resigned as head of FEMA in mid-November after six months on the job. On Monday, the disaster response organization took on its third administrator of 2025, Karen Evans.
Though Noem was joking in praising Trump for pushing the hurricanes away, the idea that the government can control the weather is a favorite conspiracy theory of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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